Earlier today I had the occasion to find myself in Times Square, and I took advantage of the opportunity to learn something new. Now Times Square has changed a lot since I was in my early teens and I had the opportunity to learn new and interesting things then. I digress…

The purpose of today’s jaunt into the city was to visit with representatives from Reuters. And so in the course of the first few minutes of the meeting I learned two new things: one was the term “infobesity,” the other thing was that news or media makes up only 10% of Reuters business.

A quick note on infobesity. Whenever I met a new term, I look it up online. By far the best definition was contained in a great blog entry on the Learning Curve Circuits Blog.

I quote that source unabashedly for you now:

the deleterious effect of excessive data consumption on the fitness and agility of individual and corporate minds. With the volume of new data being produced doubling every three days (vs. every three decades a few generations ago), Infobesity will become dramatically debilitating, though it will stimulate the growth of technology filtering tools. Those who master infofiltering will jog confidently through the fog, while those who don’t will keep staggering into lampposts.

The reason for going to see Reuters was to discuss their Reuters Messaging product. Many people didn’t know that Reuters was primarily a financial services firm. In the course of serving their customers it became clear that the end users needed a professional alternative to the consumer-friendly Instant Messaging fare that was being used.

Enter Reuters Messaging. This product is not necessarily ‘new’ having been launched in 2005 to connect the financial community in real-time to MSN Messenger and AOL Instant MessengerTM (AIM) services, effectively opening the service up to an expanded community of over 200 million people.

Communicate more broadly. S\Keep in touch with financial professionals who are using AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger directly from Reuters Messaging.

The meeting was certainly eye-opening to me. In fact, so much so, that I can promise you, you’ll be hearing more from Reuters in the days ahead, and what their plans are for the IP Communications sector.